spacing out.

Not a great photo, but hopefully you can get an idea of the 8 spacers on various molars right now. They are the shiny brassy looking wires on either side of the penultimate molar on each side.  These are meant to spread my teeth apart so a metal band can be mounted on the tooth for positioning of the sliced-up mandible bits later on.   The braces are painful much in the way the first set of braces were, but these wires are torture devices.  I understand they are a necessary evil, but they are pure-dee evil. 

Felt a little better today, but not great.  Hopefully, though, I'll feel much better when I wake up in the morning.  In any case, this is not going to turn into a me-whining-about-dental-pain blog.

Have a great Wednesday.

9:30 AM update: 
I slept better last night and was able to sleep late since I have to work at 10:00 AM.  The cough syrup numbed the pain enough for me to go to sleep for most of the night.  The brackets are more pokey than I remember, so I'm going to have to wax some irksome spots before I spend the workday on the phones.  I'll probably make and receive in the range of 100 calls today, so I won't spare the wax horses.  If I recall correctly, last time, I only really had to wax the braces at the beginning and I seem to recall that the skin inside your mouth becomes tougher and more inured to the pokey-outy bits.

Soft foods for me right now.  This is the first time in my life I've been in so much pain that I have almost no appetite-- probably a good thing in a way-- but I don't foresee eating anything but soft stuff for the near future.  Yesterday I had some oatmeal and a couple of meal-in-a-can type things, and a bit of canned chili.  Yes, canned chili. It has come to this.  It actually wasn't bad, though, and it felt nice to eat something with protein.  I predict there's a lot more canned chili in my future. 

I toughed it out and worked through the end of my shift yesterday.  I'm actually proud of myself for this, because I was very tempted to ask the bossman to cut me loose. Still, I had customers to attend and much of that distracted me from the pain.  For the most part, my speech is not greatly impacted, with my S sounds slightly more sibilant being the most pronounced effect.  No one reported difficulty in understanding me.  I also hied my arse in to bellydancing practice, so I got in a little exercise, too, and for a bit I was laughing with the ladies.  It's amazing how therapeutic that can be, isn't it? 
My front teeth are sorest at this point, and that is a huge improvement, because I thought those molars were never going to settle down and stop screaming.  This sucks, but it's for the cause-- please don't think for one minute I'd put myself through anything like this for cosmetic reasons. More on that very soon.  Tonight I'm procuring a WaterPik-- even when they are clean, I feel like there's crap lodged up in there.